You are going to have to stop me when I get too excited talking about the Greek verb,” Gilbert Rose told his class taking introductory Greek at Swarthmore College. It was 1970, and English professor Rebecca Bushnell was a freshman. “One side of my brain was saying, ‘What is this guy, a nut?’” she remembers thinking. “But the other part of me bought into it completely. . . . It was just Greek coming out your ears, but he made it so vital and so fun.” She would like to see that kind of intellectual ardor blossom in all undergraduates.

Bushnell, associate dean of arts and letters in SAS since 1998, stepped in as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in July. An author of four books, she specializes in English Renaissance studies and has taught at Penn since 1982. Her most recent book, Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens (2003), is a study of early English gardening manuals as works of fiction. It illustrates her scholar’s sense of intellectual passion and pleasure “ Book thinking,” as she puts it, puzzling through a sequence of ideas to see how they fit together, “is hard. . . but I did have fun writing it.”

The kind of cerebral zest that Rose brought to Greek—and Bushnell brought to book thinking—is not “served up on a platter by teachers alone,” she says. “Students need to pick up that enthusiasm from each other.” The thrill of thinking is more than just coursework, she adds, it’s carried out in communities like Kelly Writers House, the Vagelos Scholars program, and the college houses, where students hang out, exchange ideas and jokes, talk about movies, or come together for faculty talks and late-night study sessions. “That’s what college is all about; that’s what a liberal arts education is about.”

The city of Philadelphia, with its concert halls, museums, historical societies, jazz clubs, restaurants, and theaters, is a good place for students to indulge a sense of light-hearted, hard-headed fun. “Countless research projects are waiting to happen,” she points out, whether that means working with the local community in one of the many academically-based service courses, doing an internship in a city office, or burrowing into one of the city’s dusty archives. She’ll be searching for
more ways to plant the College experience into the rich loam of city resources.

Finding ways to convey to students why academic integrity matters is probably the
thing Bushnell is most serious about. She will also be inviting the campus community into a conversation about the shape of undergraduate education, particularly in the sciences. “The College is best built from the bottom up, with faculty and student enthusiasm and with their ideas.”

Her new book, Green Desire, is a book about dreaming, she notes. “You always have these great dreams in the spring of what your garden is going to look like, but it never turns out uite the way you want it to because nature always gets in the way.” As the new dean, Bushnell is dreaming her own dreams about the garden that is undergraduate education.